Texts Illustrating the Complexity, Quality, & Range of Student Reading 6-12

Texts Illustrating the Complexity, Quality, & Range of Student Reading 6-12

(see Common Core Appendix B showing excerpts used from these texts)

L=Lexile

RL=Reading level

Grades 6-8

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1869) (L1300)

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876) (L 950)

• “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (1915)

• The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper (1973) (L 920)

• Dragonwings by Laurence Yep (1975) (L 870)

• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (1976) (L 920)

• “Letter on Thomas Jefferson” by John Adams (1776)

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)

• “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940” by Winston Churchill (1940)

• Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Ann Petry (1955) (L 1000)

• Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck (1962) (L 1010)

Grades 9-10

• The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1592) (L 1350)

• “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

• “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe (1845)

• “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry (1906)

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) (L 680)

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953) (L890)

• The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975) (L 610)

• “Speech to the Second Virginia Convention” by Patrick Henry (1775)

• “Farewell Address” by George Washington (1796)

• “Gettysburg Address” by Abraham Lincoln (1863)

• “State of the Union Address” by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1941)

• “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964)

• “Hope, Despair and Memory” by Elie Wiesel (1997)

Grades 11-12

• “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1820)

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1848) (L 890)

• “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson (1890)

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) (L 1070)

• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) (L 1080)

• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)

• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2003) (L 1210)

• Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776)

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854) (L 1420)

• “Society and Solitude” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1857)

• “The Fallacy of Success” by G. K. Chesterton (1909)

• Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945) (L 950)

• “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946)

• “Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry” by Rudolfo Anaya (1995)